Re: Guidelines for the "symbol" syntax class

[Dmitry Gutov]

(Cc-ing emacs-devel)

On 01/04/2016 03:46 AM, John Yates wrote:

> I think that you are confusing issues of syntax and symbol resolution.

I'd put the question this way: should the symbol correspond more to an 
atomic expression in a given language, or should it be the "name" of the 
identifier or atom denoted by the expression.

To give a distant example: in Perl an PHP, you usually declare and use a 
variable by prefixing its name with $. Should $ be a symbol constituent? 
Both perl-mode and cperl-mode say no.

>   emacs' notion of symbol is purely syntactic.

And that's the model I'm trying to work in. Again, I'm not trying to 
determine qualified names.

> Starting with the the
> current symbol collection framework you could build a purely syntactic
> model of qualified names that should cover a very large set of
> contemporary languages.

I'm not sure how you think I could do that.